Discussions of treaty rights violations and Indian land loss often take an abstract form in history. Even as major court cases, such as Cobell v. Salazar, have brought these issues to the forefront in national discussions, they are often dismissed as issues that happened long ago and are therefore not relevant to most people. Pauline R. Hillaire, a Lummi elder, makes it clear in her work that nothing ever stays in the past. Tribes still feel today the loss of land and rights in the nineteenth century.

Hillaire’s book, Rights Remembered: A Salish Grandmother Speaks on American Indian History and the Future, examines the relationships between Pacific Northwest tribes and the United States by taking a big-picture approach. Her goal, as she reminds readers, is to help secure more land and more rights for tribal people by telling the stories...